Activities

These activities focus on works of art in the Whitney’s collection and special exhibitions. Through discussion, research, art making, and writing activities, we hope to encourage close looking, foster conversation between students, and connect artwork to classroom learning. Learn about our four artist-centered themes.

CONTINUOUSMURAL

T. J. Wilcox used his imagination and state of the art technology to create his panorama of New York City. Ask students to find and/or draw images of the place where they live and experiment with creating a collaborative, continuous mural of their environment. If exact images are not available, find images in magazines, newspapers, or other ephemera such as brochures, pamphlets, or maps that would represent a park, rooftops, sky, etc. Students can layer and/or overlap images and drawings so that they form a single cityscape or landscape. If students are drawing, they may want to go outside, form a circle facing outward, and draw what they see from their perspective.

What types of images appear in their mural? What types of drawn images were included? Are there images of shared space, such as parks? Were any aspects of their environment repeated or found in more than one place in the mural? Why do students think that may have occurred?

Ask younger students to draw the street where they live or where their school is. What did they include and/or leave out? What is special about their street?